The invention relates to systems and methods for automatic translation from a natural language to an artificial machine-readable language.
In recent years, an increasing number of products and services rely on gathering and analyzing large amounts of data. Examples span virtually all areas of human activity, from production to commerce, scientific research, healthcare, and defense. They include, for instance, a retail system managing stocks, clients, and sales across multiple stores and warehouses, logistics software for managing a large and diverse fleet of carriers, and an Internet advertising service relying on user profiling to target offers at potential customers. Managing large volumes of data has fostered innovation and developments in database architecture, as well as in systems and methods of interacting with the respective data. As the size and complexity of databases increase, using human operators to search, retrieve and analyze the data in fast becoming impractical.
In parallel, we are witnessing an explosive growth and diversification of electronic appliances commonly known as “the Internet of things”. Devices from mobile telephones to home appliances, wearables, entertainment devices, and various sensors and gadgets incorporated into cars, houses, etc., typically connect to remote computers and/or various databases to perform their function. A highly desirable feature of such devices and services is user friendliness. The commercial pressure to make such products and services accessible to a broad audience is driving research and development of innovative man-machine interfaces. Some examples of such technologies include personal assistants such as Apple's Siri® and Echo® from Amazon®, among others.
There is therefore considerable interest in developing systems and methods that facilitate the interaction between humans and computers, especially in applications that include database access and/or management.